On the Road

I just read another review of the recently published "scroll," the famous original version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This is a book I've read many times, and taught for the last ten years as part of a course on America in the 1950s. It's a strange book, in many ways, and not least for the different reactions it seems to provoke from readers and cultural critics. But I'm not interested in defending the book as literature or even as social commentary, although I think it's undeniably valuable as both. I'm more in the mood to consider On the Road in the long tradition of American celebrations of misfits and seekers.

But what is it about Americans that makes us find misfits and outsiders so appealing? You have only to look at the standard fare we get served up on television or in the movies, in popular music or even in the funny papers: losers, criminals, glorious and inglorious failures. They say Australia was populated with Britain's castoffs, prisoners given the chance to emigrate rather than do hard time. But America has always seemed to attract the restless ones, the seekers, both driven and clueless, those who long for something better just a little further on down the road.

That's the American story from the beginning to the present time. Everyone seems to be so upset with the current waves of immigrants who've come here looking for something better, but it's the same old story for all of us. We're all from someplace else, even our American Indians. There must be something in our collective gene pool that longs for change, the kind of change that comes from picking up, packing up, and moving on. And if there isn't a road or a trail, we'll make our own. Perhaps not all of us, but enough to form a definite American type. When you want to get away you can always jump in your car or hop on the bus and take off. Remember the destination on Ken Kesey's iconic bus: further.

And that's why I think Kerouac's On the Road strikes a resonating chord in us that none of his other books manages to do with the same success. And perhaps that's why Kerouac himself became so conflicted about the book's popularity. But in that book he taps into something essentially American, just as Twain did in Huckleberry Finn. The rebelliousness and unrepentant individualism, of course, but also the inherent idealism and love of the American landscape, as well as an acceptance of the American people themselves, in all of their crazy, demented variety; most especially the lost seekers like Neal Cassady, the holy Dean Moriarty who hears the beat so profoundly but despite the flow of his artless misarticulations can never find the words to describe the object of his quest.

I can't decide whether I find this comforting or disturbing. It's like our country itself, full of promise and menace. Are we all on a road to somewhere or nowhere? And does the destination really matter, or is it finally enough that what we offer the rest of the world is a country filled with so many different roads?